Malaria 2.0

*** This will be my last post in this blog. If you want to read about my travels please visit fromtanzaniatosudan.wordpress.com. You can also follow that blog. ***

Here I was bragging about not having had Malaria so far only a couple of days ago. Well, I can’t say that anymore…

On Monday, the day before I was planning to leave for Dar Es Salaam, we had an assembly with all the students, like we do every Monday. I told the students my good-byes and afterwards there were other announcements by other teachers when I suddenly felt really bad. I was slowly losing my consciousness. I could feel my brain shutting off. I almost just grabbed the teacher next to me, but then I could pull myself together and managed to sit down. After a few minutes I managed to leave the meeting. Then I went to the hospital with the director and indeed, the test was positive. In the hospital they had a sign in the waiting room saying “We only care, God great physician cures.” So my life was in God’s hands another time to start praying.

In my last post about Malaria I might have played the disease down too much. The reason why Doris didn’t get it so bad was probably because she was taking the preventive medication. And the reason why other Malawians don’t get it so badly is because they also develop a kind of immunity, especially if they’ve survived a childhood Malaria. But it is indeed a very serious disease, especially as a westerner who was never exposed it before. When I had malaria I read in my guide that “Many travellers are under the impression that malaria is a mild illness, that treatment is always easy and successful, and that taking anti-malaria drugs causes more illness through side effects than actually getting malaria. In Africa, this is unfortunately not true.” Apparently I was one of those ignorant travelers, mainly because of the information I got from my doctor. The first stage of the disease are flu symptoms (fever, headache, generalized aches and pains), which I had the day before. I didn’t want to run to the doctor then because I had just been to the doctor 3 days before to check for malaria and it was negative. So I didn’t want to always rush to doctor for nothing. Then the next stage of symptoms “could develop within 24 hours: jaundice, reduced consciousness [that was my case] and coma, followed by death.”

Splitting headaches, complete loss of appetite, strong shivers followed by strong fever were some of my symptoms. The bed was wet through and through of my sweat, not just the covers but the whole mattress. To sleep in it had become a bad experience even if I was healthy. Any time I had to sit up was a pain, walking even more so. I used water bottles to pee in so I wouldn’t have to get up.

But enough of the wining. Fact is that I was ok within 48 hours and I am very happy about that. Within those 48 hours I didn’t think it possible to recover of it in such a short amount of time. I have decided, however, to try to change my strategy to preventive medication after all, though. I do not want to go through something like this in a place where I don’t know anybody and am all by myself. Africa is great, if you are healthy. Then the 24 hour bus ride to Dar Es Salaam that I had booked might have been an adventure. A very strenuous one, but it would have been an experience. If you are suffering from malaria, however, it becomes an impossibility. So I had to rebook to a flight the day later. I arrived in Dar around the same time, so I could still pick up my car the next day.

You can imagine that I imagined my going away from Zipatso Academy a bit differently. Fortunately I had a going away party on Friday where I wrote a speech. I don’t know how interesting it will be for you to read, but it might be, since it summarizes my time with the teachers a bit:

Going Away Speech

Thank you very much for having me here and thank you for being so kind to me. I don’t take that for granted! This has been an amazing experience for me, and largely because of the people I met here. This isn’t limited to you, it also includes the people I could meet during my week on the animal farm, my friend whom I met in Lilongwe, and even all the people I met on the streets shouting Mzungu, with a smile on their faces, stopping me to chat, etc. But you guys definitely did have the largest part in this. I have found Malawians to be very peaceful, friendly, open, and warm hearted. It really is the warm heart of Africa.

Some of the highlights were the sports that I could teach the kids, having its peak in the teacher student games, especially in volleyball, where we beat them without mercy. I enjoyed the kids here too. They are good ones and I really liked working with them.

I also won’t forget the meetings. They are usually quite endless, that’s why I didn’t dare to say anything before, out of fear to prolong the meeting by another hour. Now it’s my going away speech, so you will have to hear this out without being able to comment on it. We seem to have the results at the very top of the list – it almost seems to be the schools purpose. Results in tests are important, sure, and maybe even more so for a private school that has to look good so that more people will send their kids here. But for me, what any education ultimately hopes to achieve or should hope to achieve, is to create thinking members of a society who can “survive”, either in the job market, or otherwise to have the tools and the confidence to try to do something on their own. I think that the biggest difference in education between Malawi and Switzerland is, that we educate everybody, from the dumbest to the smartest. We know that we need everybody, and everybody can do his or her best. We often find people owning their own business and doing very well for themselves who weren’t great in school. But we still taught them to the point where they were able to do great things. In Malawi, unfortunately this is different. Education is not inclusive, but rather like a funnel, where only the best ones make it even to secondary education. So much talent and possibilities are lost. This is the toll that poverty is able to take. But at this school we have the possibility to educate everybody that we get to reach the best they can. We don’t need better students to increase the results, and we don’t need to know what questions will come on the test to improve results. We need to make the students that we have better. So maybe we shouldn’t always ask ourselves “How can we improve our test results?” but rather “How can we be the best teachers that we can be for these students?” and “What do the students need, to do better?”

And I think that in this respect we are already on a very good path. I had the chance to visit all of you in class at least once - Gift’s class I even visited many times. I was interested in how you all teach, and I hope it didn’t seem like supervision, because that’s not at all what it was. I could see how you teach here, and even though you all said you didn’t want to become teachers, it seemed to me that some of you seem to be born teachers. There are many things that I learned about teaching skills, many of them I will take back home with me and apply at the school where I will be teaching. I will also definitely teach some short stories about Africa in my English classes from the book Looking for a Rain God. I think it will be good for my students to learn about Africa from someone who actually has spent a significant amount of time there.

I am very glad that you will get to see Switzerland as well. Trust me, it will be very different for you. Unfortunately, you will only be there for two weeks, which is a shame, because I am very glad I could be in Malawi for so long. There were many things about Malawi that at first I didn’t understand and found strange, but only after a while saw why and how they are useful here in Malawi. So what I am asking you for when you come to Switzerland is to be very open. There will be many things that you won’t understand, but be curios and ask. There will be many things that you won’t like and that will be very strange to you. Try to find out why we do things the way we do. (And if you need nsima I suggest you take a bag of maize flower with you).

When you come I will be very happy to meet you again and show you my country. I believe that it’s a good one as well, and that the people are nice, but to you they might seem cold at first (maybe that’s due to the weather).

Anyways, thank you again for everything, I’ve come to like you all very much and I am looking forward to greeting you in Switzerland!

- Stefan